Paul Gilding at TED: Choosing life over fear - The coming war for a sustainable civilisation

This talk by sustainability campaigner Paul Gilding is both pessimistic and optimistic about the future of human civilisation facing numerous planetary crises including human overpopulation, overuse of resources, anthropogenic climate change, and biodiversity loss. The earth is now full. Human civilisation is facing a great disruption this century, within our lifetimes.

Economic growth as we know it is dead, the planet can no longer sustain infinite growth, without degradation of our working capital, the earth and it's resources. We are now spending the future of our children.

Paul stresses that where we have a great crisis, humans have the capability to act with great resourcefulness. We have an opportunity for change. We can make the preparations in transitioning our lives, our communities through the great disruption.

Is it possible to decouple economic wealth from carbon dioxide emission rates?

Is it possible to decouple economic wealth from carbon dioxide emission rates? Dr Tim Garrett applies basic thermodynamic physics principles to the economics of wealth, carbon emission rates and civilization and comes up with some very disturbing results.

I came across this randomly chasing youtube links. This talk captured in a 3 part video was given at the Pacific Institute for Climate Studies Seminar May 31st, 2010, University of Victoria in Canada, but only recently uploaded to youtube in December 2011. Dr. Tim Garrett is an Associate Professor of Physics in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, whose main academic work is in cloud physics.